The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.

Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.